Alameda County heaping new hardship on poor criminal suspects

East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., on Wednesday, June 28, 2017.

East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., on Wednesday, June...

Justice is moving further out of reach for the poorest in Alameda County.

In an attempt to centralize the process in which criminal defendants enter a plea, learn their rights and meet their court-appointed attorneys, county officials will soon hold arraignments nearly 30 miles southeast of Oakland, at the new East County Hall of Justice in Dublin.

Most people arrested in Alameda County live closer to Oakland than to Dublin.

But the inconvenient location is only for defendants who are too poor to make bail, according to Morris Jacobson, the county’s presiding judge, who came up with the idea. Defendants with enough cash for bail will still get to have their arrangements at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse in downtown Oakland.

“If you can afford to pay that bail, you get your first appearance in Oakland, not Dublin,” Brendon Woods, the Alameda County public defender, told me. “If they can afford to bail out, their case is heard in Oakland. So this comes down to money and access.”

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In other words, you can slide out of jail by sliding a debit or credit card, a perk of the criminal justice system that so many in Alameda County can’t afford.

The $147 million facility in Dublin, a gleaming building that nobody wants to be caught in unless they work there, is the first new courthouse built in Alameda County in decades. It is expected to be fully operational by the end of this month.

Jacobson, who decided without community input to move arraignments to Dublin, says the idea he’s been kicking around since 2014 will save money. While he hasn’t said how much, at first glance it appears to be a sound, fiscally responsible decision.

Right now, suspects arrested in Alameda County are housed in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin before being transported to Oakland for arraignment. According to Jacobson, holding arraignments in the new courthouse, which is 300 yards away from the jail, will slash transportation costs and save time.

That might be true — but only for the court and the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, which buses the inmates back and forth in stainless steel handcuffs and leg irons.

Beginning next month, family and friends who want to provide support at an arraignment will have to drive an hour round-trip from Oakland or settle in for three hours on BART, paying $9 a person for round-trip tickets.

Arraignments usually last only a few minutes. Yet they are the crucial, introductory part of any case, when criminal charges are formally announced by the district attorney’s office and when defendants who can’t afford a private attorney are assigned a public defender.

Unsurprisingly, the arraignment is also when the criminal justice system, crippled by racial and social inequities, begins breaking down for the poorest among us. Moving arraignments to Dublin will ensure that the inequities only get worse: Not only will friends and families have to work harder to get to court, so will defense attorneys.

Because the Alameda County public defender doesn’t have an office in Dublin, attorneys will waste more time in Bay Area traffic and spend less time digging into the cases stacked on their desks. The back-and-forth traveling could make public defenders less effective.

To drive my point home: The extra miles put more lives at risk.

“They would have to go there for one appearance, and the rest of their cases are in Oakland,” Woods, the county public defender, said about his staff attorneys. “For me, it’s just a logistical nightmare trying to figure out how to make it work.

“This is my worry — we’re going to spend more time traveling than preparing for cases.”

There’s something that can be done to keep Jacobson and Woods from driving each other crazy. Jacobson should take a cue from Santa Clara County. Instead of charging a cash bail, the county put together a risk-assessment program that has reduced the jail population.

The program has saved Santa Clara County millions, so why not try an alternative plan that could keep millions in the pockets of Alameda County taxpayers?

A statewide solution to this problem stalled in the Assembly last week: a bill by Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, to eliminate cash bail and let judges decide if defendants need to be jailed until trial.

On a week when we celebrate another year of this country’s independence, let’s not forget the people who can’t afford to buy their freedom.